Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England

Depicting Dress in Black-Letter Ballads

Clare Backhouse

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781784538378
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786721969
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Fashion Design
• Index: History

Fashion featured in black-letter broadside ballads over a hundred years before fashion magazines appeared in England. In the seventeenth century, these single-sheet prints contained rhyming song texts and woodcut pictures, accessible to almost everyone in the country. Dress was a popular subject for ballads, as well as being a commodity with close material and cultural connections to them.This book analyses how the distinctive words and images of these ballads made meaning, both in relation to each other on the ballad sheet and in response to contemporary national events, sumptuary legislation, religious practice, economic theory, the visual arts and literature. In this context, Clare Backhouse argues, seventeenth-century ballads increasingly celebrated the proliferation of print and fashionable dress, envisioning new roles for men and women in terms of fashion consumption and its importance to national prosperity. The book demonstrates how the hitherto overlooked but extensive source material that these ballads offer can enrich the histories of dress, art and culture in early modern England.

1

Commodities of Print and Dress

‘The logic of clothing,’ Daniel Roche observes:

offers a way of understanding and a means of studying the social transformations taking place within urban melting-pots … It poses all the problems, those of raw materials, of the processes and structure of production, of cost and benefits, of cultural constraints and variations in time and space.¹

During the seventeenth century, this ‘logic’ of clothing – its raw materials, its production processes and its cultural space – was also shared with broadside ballad sheets. That is to say, broadside ballads and dress were fundamentally connected on many levels. To some extent, early modern scholars have already recognised a connection at the point of sale. For example, certain geographical areas of London, such as St Paul’s churchyard, were centres for selling both printed and clothing commodities.² More importantly, as Margaret Spufford has shown, print and dress were typically sold by the same itinerant salesmen, who were described at the time as pedlars, chapmen or hawkers. These highly mobile vendors – called pedlars here³ – carried printed paper and clothing from the centre of cities to the farthest corners of the country.⁴

However, the links between print and dress in seventeenth-century England are much deeper and more complex than has been recognised hitherto. Taking a cultural history approach, we will attend to the circulation of ideas surrounding print and dress both before and after they entered the pedlar’s pack, focusing on ‘use and practice’ in order to ‘gain entry into the world of meanings of those among whom we have never lived’.⁵ As this chapter will contend, ballads and dress were commodities linked at every stage of what Arjun Appadurai has called their ‘exchangeability’ or ‘commodity potential’, from production, through exchange and distribution, to consumption.⁶ This fundamental and many-layered relationship offers a historical basis upon which to examine the representation of dress in ballads. The chapter therefore explores what the basic materials of dress and ballads – fabric and paper – shared in terms of their production processes, sales and patterns in consumption. Drawing upon contemporary literature and documentation, we will examine their physical and figurative shared history and ask how it was understood in the period.

Producing textiles and paper

By the time that ballads and clothing items found themselves as objects in the same pedlar’s pack, they had already shared a long series of other connections that would have been commonplace to seventeenth-century consumers. To open up these associations, we first examine ballads and clothing as commodities within the wider context of textile and paper production. An overview of textile manufacture introduces the principal raw materials of the period – wool, silk, cotton, hemp and linen – elucidating their production processes and their relative cultural value on the textile commodity market. This gives background to the meanings that ballads assigned to these materials as clothing, which will be discussed in later chapters. A brief survey of English paper-making in the period demonstrates not only how the paper and print trades relied upon recycled clothing, but also how the the clothing trades relied upon paper as an element of both of inner garment construction and surface textile design. Together, this variety of physical interconnections will reveal how clothing and print were objects tied together in multiple ways, as they moved in and out of the commodity phases of their existence. We therefore now turn to examine the typical textile contents of a pedlar’s pack, how they were made, and what they might have meant for the pedlar’s customers.

Wool

Of all the textiles a pedlar carried, wool was seen as the quintessentially English type.⁷ Sheep farming and wool processing had brought great prosperity to England, and wool was associated with the very essence of English identity. This is portrayed in the ballad The Shepheard and the King, where the social gap between the title’s two protagonists is closed by their shared appreciation for wool and sheep.⁸ In practice, several kinds of woollen textile were named after specific English towns or counties, such as ‘Tauntons’ or ‘Short Suffolks’, so that the welfare of England’s people and land was both imaginatively as well as practically tied to wool production.⁹

From the Middle Ages, raw English wool dominated the country’s export economy; after the 1550s, woven wool cloth was exported as well. Depending on its yarn and weave, this ranged from very light, fine ‘New Drapery stuffs’ to cheap, ‘kersey’ cloth, made of uneven, worst-quality thick yarn. Heavy, dense ‘broadcloth’ was considered the best and most characteristic of England’s woollen textiles.¹⁰ Overall, however, wool’s national symbolism was connected to its importance as a source of employment. Its numerous stages of production required many workers, including shepherds, wool brokers, clothiers, spinners, weavers, fullers, rowers and, finally, shearmen.¹¹

Although the association between wool and English national pride continued through the seventeenth century, its peak of success in the mid-1500s was long past. European-wrought silks brought strong competition in the early 1600s, while the over-reaching aims of the Cockayne Project of 1614–17 tried (and failed) to force Dutch markets to buy dyed and finished, instead of unfinished, wool.¹² Yet, despite its trade and production problems, wool remained a textile which aroused recurring nostalgic lamentations of lost national pride, particularly whenever it faced new market difficulties:¹³ it was materially and culturally important for the country’s identity.

Silk

Silk was more expensive than other textiles, because it had to be imported raw from China and defied all efforts to produce it in England. In 1680, a pedlar called Richard Ridding had his wares valued. His red woollen tape was valued at a halfpenny per yard, but his silken ribbons were costlier, at twopence each.¹⁴ The ballad The Virgins Constancy imagined a ‘Faithful Marriner’ returning home to deck his sweetheart with valuable gifts from abroad, saying:

I’ve brought thee home most costly things,

Rare precious stones, and diamond Rings,

Rich Taffities, and Silks so fine,

To deck my Love, for thou are mine.¹⁵

Woven silk was uniquely colourful, lustrous, light and strong, and its high value throughout the seventeenth century supported the perception of silk fabrics as significant love-gifts. Even low quality, leftover scraps were spun into threads for sewing and knitting, or perhaps for ribbons like those sold by Richard Riddings.

Taken as filaments directly from silkworm cocoons, silk fibres were twisted or ‘thrown’ into threads: strong ‘organzine’ for warp, or weaker ‘tram’ threads for weft.¹⁶ Until the mid-sixteenth century, independent silkwomen were largely in control of importing and working silk goods into ribbons and small luxury wares. An influx of Huguenot refugees to England in the late sixteenth century helped establish broadloom silk weaving as a male-only industry, which expanded considerably after a second wave of Huguenot immigration in the 1680s.¹⁷ Women lost their independent foothold in silk working, but a divide remained between ribbon-weaving or ‘narrow-wares’, and broadloom weaving of wider silk textiles.¹⁸ As we will see in later chapters, while immigrants aroused anger and suspicion from native silkworkers, their new production techniques allowed England to compete with Continental silks.¹⁹

Although silk textiles were associated with high fashion, weaving them was a long process and complex brocade designs could further slow the pace. Master weavers employed outworkers to make individual pieces of broad silk for an agreed piece-rate; the design for one piece could take up to six weeks to plan and set up for weaving, which even then progressed at a maximum rate of only one yard a day. Silk’s unmatched expense and kudos might suggest that it was a reliable luxury commodity (particularly compared to the troubles of the wool cloth industry); but in fact, it too could be subject to sudden changes in fortune. In addition to the vicissitudes of fashion, silk weavers faced the constant threat of deaths at Court, because the sobriety of national mourning precluded the wearing of colourful silk altogether. For a weaver in the midst of constructing a new piece of silk, this fashion hiatus might last until the design he was weaving had ceased to be popular.²⁰

Cotton

Like silk, raw and finished cotton were imports. However, unlike silk, the relatively gradual increases in consumption of pure cotton goods in seventeenth-century England may explain why few seventeenth-century ballads mention them. Presumably cotton had not built up enough of an individual ‘character’ in consumers’ minds to merit specific discussion.²¹ Unlike silk, cotton goods were associated with imperial expansion: they first appeared on English shores as cargo of the East India Company. Cotton had been woven in Europe since the fourteenth century, usually mixed with linen into a twill ‘fustian’;²² but until Crompton’s spinning mule appeared in the 1770s it was impossible to produce in England a strong, even warp thread for pure cotton cloth.²³ Pure cotton cloth consumption is therefore often associated with the eighteenth century, though in fact such fabrics were imported to England from at least the mid-sixteenth century, for both furnishing and dress.²⁴

Woven in India, pure cotton textiles were known as ‘calicoes’, a reference to ‘Calicut’, or Kozhikode, then one of India’s main trading ports with Europe. There were many practical reasons for their success: unlike worsted and wool, cotton held its colour and washed easily.²⁵ Cottons could thus replace the lighter wools of the ‘New Draperies’, and compete with the washability and weight of linens; by 1695, cottons were already in common use for shirts and shifts.²⁶ To promote demand for cotton across different levels of society, the East India Company created different varieties and quality grades of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Citations and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Commodities of Print and Dress
• 2 Ballad Comment on Dress
• 3 Ballad Pictures: Conventions of Clothes and the Body
• 4 Classical Ideals and Satirical Deviations, Part I: Masculinity, Fashion and the Defence of the Nation
• 5 Classical Ideals and Satirical Deviations, Part II: Female Bodies, Feminine Fashions and Economic Benefits
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements